VATICAN - THE WORDS OF DOCTRINE - Man's conversion towards God is the task of the Church, Rev Nicola Bux and Rev Salvatore Vitiello

Thursday, 6 September 2007

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Jesus wanted the Church to speak to the world about God so man would be converted and would live. Instead increasingly we come across books written by Christians or public interventions by bishops or clergy who describe or lead people to see the Church as a geographical and political phenomenon, to the point that her effectiveness is judged according to whether she responds or not to the ‘challenge' or better ‘the challenges’ - a favourite word now for laity and ecclesiastics - put to her of course and always by the world. So they are careful to see she defends human rights and not dictatorships, that she protects peoples in danger of extinction father than show an interest in matters of economy, and so forth.
But is this really the Church's calling? Is this her mission? Is this the reason for which she was instituted by her founder Jesus Christ? Even her global extension, from which comes her attribute of Catholic, is today expected to be assessed according to the parameters of multinational companies: or in other words the ‘religious product’ of one continent she succeeds in planting in another, even with great attention given to the made in, or inculturation, the magical word which unfortunately Jesus did not know at the time when he sent his disciples out to the whole world. So: today it is more important for a missionary to know everything about the culture of the people of a nation rather than their longing for God which is unchanging and is the same at every latitude. Yes, because it has become more important to understand the challenges which cultures and mentalities represent for the Church rather than the call to conversion which Jesus desired and desires to address to every man and women of every epoch announcing the Gospel, seeing that, the latter begins with a call to conversion (cfr Mk 1,14-15).
Present day Church Movements, like the Medieval mendicant orders and modern religious congregations, set out from Europe to make the name of Jesus known to those who had not yet heard it, because in this way the person receives health in soul and body, or in the classical term, salvation. For this purpose these groups are not emanations of some giant association of voluntary workers to solve definitively the problem of hunger or bring peace to the world or other similar grave emergencies, nor are missionaries heroes called to similar epic actions: both are part of the Church, and are called simply today to undertake “new evangelisation”, - a term coined by John Paul II but prepared by Paul VI, in the wake of impulse given to missionary activity by the Fidei donum document of Pius XII - because the secularised men and women of Europe and North America, the poor men and women of Latin America, Africa, Asia, unless they hear the Gospel and encounter Jesus will always be poor and deprived of the answer to the meaning of life.
The Popes come and go but the Church and her mission remain the same, the one Jesus gave her: to convert the hearts of all men and women to God. The Lord created the Church in order to let humanity know Him and through Him come to know the Father; this is why the encounter with Jesus is the motivation behind all her activity, including social work. And this explains why the Church is not interested and cannot not interested in mundane success or answers, or perhaps solutions to the world's ‘challenges’. Christ told us he has conquered the world (cfr Jn 16,33): in what sense? It is enough that just one man turns away from sin and towards the love of God: Deus caritas est. If then, as it comes about, this happens for many men and women, in one country rather than another, in one time better than in another, this is due solely to His grace, not to some ‘pastoral plan’ - another word today abused which has replaced the term of much greater significance ‘apostolate’ -. An so the People of God is born again and again. And the sole task of the Church is to nourish the faith of the people of God.
Conversion and faith do not depend simply on forms and modes of adaptation - as it is said - of the theological categories elaborated in the West. Two examples: the Church after caring for every sick person, is asked, not to devise or to sustain health-programmes for the prevention of AIDS, but instead to help every human person understand that the heart and the body, if they abstain from all indecency, as St Paul says, will avoid any disease physical or moral; the Church is not called to be a majority rather than a minority on a continent, or to understand how she is perceived by the prevailing mentality, since her duty is not to start negotiations or, as we say today, interreligious dialogue, but to establish the one dialogue which Jesus came to start with every man and women women, religious or not, moral or immoral, that they may drawn to Him and have a desire to open their hearts and convert them to God. Only then will the Church “meet the requirements” before the One who instituted her for the salvation of the world. (Agenzia Fides 6/9/2007; righe 53, parole 836)


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